On 07/21/2012 07:44 AM, John Emmas wrote: > Perhaps an answer would be to play down the mailing lists and IRC > (for users) and encourage more use of the GTK+ forum. The great > advantages of forums are:-
My vote is e-mail or nntp instead of forums. > > 1) They keep a reasonably ordered record of discussions. Sure, but e-mail lists or nntp can do this as well, and are, in my opinion, more easily searched by google, provided the list archive is public, which almost all listservs can do. > 2) Users only see the discussions they want to subscribe to. I'm not sure such fine-grained control is that useful to the community that GTK devs might be wanting to reach. Splitting the lists by purpose (devel vs application development) seems good enough. > 3) Users feel more connected to the product than they do with a mailing list. Only in your opinion. > 4) Developers can dip into discussions as and when it's convenient for > them. This is the beauty of using e-mailing lists or newsgroups and a real e-mail client like Thunderbird or any traditional client. Threaded views allow this much more easily than forums. No need to "bump" a topic just to keep it in sight. Web forums tend to lose participation in topics quickly if other topics are also popular and bump them off. > 5) Some users can be 'Power Users' who help the others (thereby > reducing time pressures on the actual devs). Sure, but on forums I do frequent, I just find the colored badges annoying because they don't really relate to the person's knowledge levels necessarily. On the list we already can tell quickly (after a week or two) who knows what they are talking about and who have good answers to questions. At least it is very apparent on other lists I'm on. > Some of those things are theoretically possible with a mailing list - > but forums definitely handle them better. I'm sure there are lots of > other things that would help too. We just need to start thinking > them up! I can't think of anything a forum can do better than lists myself. I consider web-based forums to be the scourge of the internet. What I definitely do not need is another web forum to have to follow. The fact that RSS feed aggregators even exist would seem to me to be proof of the inadequacies of web-based solutions. E-mail lists or newsgroups work excellently well for the following reasons: 1. Everything is in one place as far as I'm concerned. I simply fire up Thunderbird and the mailing lists from the dozen or so lists I follow are all there in their own neat little folders which I can open up and browse very quickly without having to go to a url, possibly remember usernames and passwords, etc. Perhaps those that prefer forums need simply to be introduced to IMAP folders and automatic mail filters which are brain-dead simple to set up (Gmail can do them with just a single click, "filter messages from this list"). 2. E-mail clients are way faster than forums. Except for the D language forum, every forum I have ever used was frustratingly slow. 3. E-mail has a threaded structure that few forums have. Forums tend to be pretty much be linear, which only works well for a conversation between two people. In real life, conversation between many people often involves branches or threads of discussion. Indeed in thunderbird I can watch parts of a thread work out, and ignore other parts. For example, on the python list, any branch of a thread that involves certain people who are known trolls is almost certainly not worth even going down. However other branches of the same thread from other respected people are going to be insightful and informative so I will read those. Almost all forums have no similar structure. Even worse most forum affectionados stare at me blankly when I talk about threaded topics. They don't even realize what they are. I kind of blame google for this and their "conversation" view of e-mail which fails horribly for the kind of needs that have been mentioned by the parent and grandparent posters. 4. More usernames and passwords required to participate, and often even to search. With e-mail, posting a message is normally just a matter of sending from a registered e-mail address. Spam can be a problem, sure. But forum spam gets bad too. 5. E-mail just works better on handheld devices. I don't want to have to mess with the mobile web browser for dozens of forums, or worse an app for each forum that is really just a mobile browser. Tapatalk makes life a bit easier for mobile users, but still that's a proprietary solution. 6. I'd rather use my e-mail client's editor than some tiny html editor widget. I hate forums so much that I once wrote a python app that would scrape a web forum and offer it as an nntp source. Forums, since they lack the true threaded structure I mentioned, don't map especially well to e-mail or nntp unfortunately, so I abandoned the project. Just my thoughts. _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
